sally fraser writes…https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com
because the personal is indeed politicalMon, 14 Dec 2015 14:44:19 +0000en
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1 http://wordpress.com/https://s0.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngsally fraser writes…https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com
sally fraser has movedhttps://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/sally-fraser-has-moved/
https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/sally-fraser-has-moved/#respondMon, 14 Dec 2015 14:44:19 +0000http://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/?p=157676Sally Fraser has moved to http://www.sallyfraser.net. New post from the Paris climate protests here http://sallyfraser.net/2015/12/14/12-12-15-red-lines/
]]>https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/sally-fraser-has-moved/feed/0sallypcfraseron harvest…https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/on-harvest/
https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/on-harvest/#respondThu, 29 Oct 2015 17:24:34 +0000http://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/?p=157623My mum is reading our copy of New Internationalist. She is all fired up. She says she didn’t know there were so many things going on that she didn’t know about. Then she is excited because she reads about the Paris climate summit, and realsies that is why I have asked her to babysit for a few days in December. “That means I am taking part” she says, chuffed to bits: “by enabling you to go I am taking part in what might be ‘the biggest act of civil disobedience the world has ever seen’, it says here”. You can already imagine her telling her mates at bridge club about this. She tears off the back cover of the magazine to take home and order a subscription.

Which is how it works, isn’t it? Change. It is in the doing, in the way of being, in the how and why as well as the what. You need all the bits together. And I think we have a lot of that round here.

We have just been celebrating harvest. I took the last of my straggling crops, leftover chard, bitter lettuce leaves, nasturtiums and rocket, and blended them into a purple mulch with garlic, chillies and vinegar. So satisfying to turn what I might have thought of as wasted, what had turned bitter and sour, into something tasty and nourishing. I baked bread to share, my daughter pressing seeds onto the top of the dough. I took it along and laid it out on the table. We danced, and I was reminded of the need for carnival, for celebration. I found myself feeling ever more confident in my growing belief that most problems in life are curable by at least one of gardening, dancing or sex. All three if possible, but ideally not at the same time.

Ian Mackinnon of the Scottish Crofting federation spoke to us, opening in soft Gaelic which gave us all goosebumps. We sat mesmerised, like children who didn’t understand the words but new they were listening to something important. When he switched to English, many of us cried. Because he talked to us about the different words for community and belonging in his own language, how the people you grow, dance and work with become part of who you are. And perhaps we felt a pang of something; recognition, belonging. He said that legally, our croft was not a croft, but in other senses it was because we worked it communally. He read a statement from the SCF which praised our initiative as a “great example of citizens not waiting for government action but getting on and doing it for ourselves. People taking collective action for a more sustainable agriculture and food production and more equitable access to land”. And he said that what we had was about doing things differently.

The belief that things can be done differently is what I have found between the sunflowers and the beetroots. Taking barren land and becoming a producer rather than a consumer has taken the power over what my children eat back from corporate monsters and into my own soily hands. Watching my son sit croft-side munching rocket leaves, or seeing my daughter’s eager fingers pull triumphant carrots, I know I am rooting them to their place, giving them something which cannot be bought. Against this back-drop, and the vibrancy of the referendum campaign, I have become politicised. I book train tickets to Paris and fill my shelves with magazines which surprise my mum. I know my voice is small but I can still use it.

As the harvest festival closes we sing song and cry some more. Pete Seeger’s gardening song, mother earth will make you strong if you give her love and care, feels like an echo of the gaelic proverb quoted in the crofting federation’s statement: put your trust in the earth, it never let you down. We sing Colum Sands’ Daughters and Sons, about how we sow the seeds of equality and justice for our children. I suppose our tears are a silent recognition of the fact that we all overcome something to be here, each of us rejects those structures and systems which have told us No, you cannot change things, that privilege and power will always trump your fragility and longing for justice. That what has always been always will be. But we see growth all around us, we see seasons and change, and moreover we know the consequences of ignoring fragility.

As I leave a different song fills my head, Jim Garlands I don’t want your millions mister, with the additional verse by Peter Blood, something in the reclaiming, the empowering, the vision of equality.

You never earned those millions, Mister

They were produced by working hands

We’re taking back our own wealth, Mister

Winning back our lives and lands.

But this is a gentle revolution, one happening as much inside of us as anywhere else. Or it is for me. I look up that Gaelic proverb and find that a different translation says “put your faith in the earth, it never left you empty”. I feel grounded, nourished, ready for change. Mother earth is making me strong.

]]>https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/on-harvest/feed/0sallypcfraseron love magichttps://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/on-love-magic/
https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/on-love-magic/#respondSat, 12 Sep 2015 10:43:34 +0000http://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/?p=157585I have been having to do a bit of soul-searching lately. Well, more of a soul audit really. I’m in a real muddle, stuck here surrounded by all these cans of worms I have opened and can’t close again. It all looks as chaotic as my Tupperware cupboard, as if I need to just stand bouncer like at the door saying ‘if you’ve not got a lid, you’re not going in’. But as my friend Dan would say, I need to just deal with them all One Tin At A Time.

One of the things I have been thinking about is why I do, well, whatever it is I do. There are lots of reasons, but I thought I would start with one of them. When thinking about why I started writing, I remembered that I first picked up my pen, and it was a pen, after years and years to write a children’s story, a fairy story. The thing was written long hand, on scraps of paper in what was to become my chair in the pub. I have decided to share it here, with the beautiful illustrations of Lisa Peterrson, but I will say a few words about it first.

When my beautiful niece was three years old it was discovered that she had a massive brain tumour. She had to undergo months of hideous, hideous treatment. She lost a lot of her movement and speech. She used to like to pick flowers every day and my whole family became local menaces, nicking them from people’s gardens if they were the ones she wanted. If you asked her how she was she would always say ‘good’. She had a real sense of purpose. Day in day out, I have to pick these flowers, and I have loving to do, and being loved to do, so I’ll hang on in there.

I remember when she was in hospital or being cared for at home being struck by the thought that you could actually see love. It was something visible, it had a life of its own and it was very much in action in all of us. But in no-one more than my sister. I had a real sense that what I could see in her was the most powerful force in the world. She is a tiny woman, much smaller than me, but she seemed possessed by some kind of gargantuan strength, to keep loving, to keep caring, to keep going. They put a punch-bag up in her garage for her to hit but she knocked it clean out of its fastenings.

I learned more from my niece and my sister at that time than I have ever learned from anything. This belief in the wisdom and importance of children, and the powerful force of loving them, underpins everything I do. The belief in love as transformative, strong and fearless, always challenging, and with a life of its own.

I wrote this story for my sister to read to my niece Katie. The minister read it at her funeral too and we all held hands and tried to feel a little love magic. She died on December 4th 2012 aged four.

The It’s-Not-Fair Fairy

Once upon a time, in a far-away, far-away kingdom, in a magical garden hidden away in the corner of an enchanted forest, lived a fairy princess. The princess had a lovely mummy and daddy, the Fairy Queen and King, and lots of lovely brothers and sisters, the other fairy princes and princesses, but she was not happy. Something really, really horrid had happened to her. She had lost a lot of her magic. One of her fairy wings did not work. Her fairy feet were all wobbly. And when she opened her mouth to say her spells, sometimes the words didn’t come out how she wanted. She felt sad and angry and frustrated because she could not fly with the other fairies, or run with them on her wobbly feet, and she was tired of people not understanding when she tried to say her spells.

And she was frightened, because sometimes her wings were sore and sometimes her tummy felt yucky and sometimes she just didn’t feel right.

“It’s not fair!” she said one day to her fairy queen mummy.

“No, it’s not fair,” said her mummy. “It is definitely not fair at all. If mummy or anyone in the whole kingdom could make it better, we would, and we are so sad that no one can fix this.”

“I’m sad too,” said the fairy princess. “I have tried to be brave but I have had enough.”

“I know you have,” said the fairy queen. “No one can be brave all the time, and you don’t have to be. You just have to remember that you still have the most powerful magic of all, the kind of magic that will never run out and which no one can take away: and that is love.”

“What does that mean?” asked the fairy princess.

“Well,” replied her mummy, “love is the most special of all the kinds of magic. Love is the magic that puts the sparkle in the dew drops. Love is the magic that puts the colours in the rainbow. Love is the magic that puts the scent in all the flowers, and when the birds sing their songs, they sing them because of the magic of love. You have love because mummy and daddy, and everyone who meets you, loves you, and nothing will ever change that.”

“But how does that help me?” asked the fairy princess.

“Oh darling,” said her mummy, “I’m not sure if anything mummy can tell you can really help. There are lots of people who believe that this is only one tiny kingdom, in one tiny garden, in one corner of a huge forest, and that somewhere there is another kingdom where everyone who has lost their magic will find it, and where everyone who has been sad will be happy, and where all of us will dance together again. Maybe when you are sad you can think about that. Or maybe you could remember your love magic and it might help you when you are learning to fly or run again if you feel frightened. You could use it like a spell and say “I fly a little… I fly with love. I walk a little… I walk with love. I dance a little… I dance with love.”

The fairy princess looked a little unsure. “Maybe…” she said, “but I am just so tired.”

“I know you are tired,” said the fairy queen. “Just try a little at a time when you feel that you can.”

And so the fairy princess wobbled sometimes, and stumbled sometimes, and sometimes she muddled her spells. But when she felt frustrated and tired of trying she looked out across the flower meadows and smiled a little smile to herself because she had a little secret. She knew that she still had the most powerful magic of all, and that she had the love that was putting the sparkle in the dew drops and the colours in the rainbow and the scent in every flower in the garden, and that every time she heard the birds singing they were singing just for her.

]]>https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/on-love-magic/feed/0fairy3sallypcfraserfairy4fairy1fairy3fairy2on health and safety…https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/on-health-and-safety/
https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/on-health-and-safety/#respondThu, 11 Jun 2015 11:58:21 +0000http://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/?p=157524I had a sublime moment the other day at gaelic playgroup. I may be the first person to have ever said that. I was staring at the Tupperware containers which hold the Grown-Up Snacks, as someone carefully filled a giant pot of what would be my first proper coffee in days, when I spotted some choco-liebniz biscuits. I thought , indeed I said, there isn’t anything I want more in the world right now than a coffee and choco-liebniz biscuit, and I can have it. For that moment, life was perfect.

In fact, the actual having of the choco-liebnitz and the coffee was even more blissful than the wanting-it-and-knowing-I-can-have-it, which I would say is pretty rare in the whole fantasy/desire/longing/reality set-up. It was interrupted only by the following conversation with my small son at the kids snack table:

“Mummy, why did you tell me that white rice cakes taste the same as purple rice cakes when they don’t?”

“Mummy lied to you Anthony. I lied because I just wanted you to eat your snack so I could stand here and drink my coffee.”

Small son responded well to this rare showing of inscrutable honesty, and quietly carried on with his snack. And I thought, was I strong enough to be honest because I was being so nice to myself with the biscuit? Maybe…

In a similar way, we were having a picnic in the pissing rain under a tree in Linlithgow last week, at the end of a magical pre-school weekend away. You had had to choose your sandwich in advance, I had gone for BR- CC + J ( Brown Roll, Coronation Chicken + Juice) and the whole thing suited me well as I love sandwich anticipation and I don’t much like surprises. Small son had gone for WR- C + J, which was a bit problematic as he only actually likes his White Rolls with Cheese and marmite, but of course that wasn’t an option. I had hence had a massive dilemma about the sort of mother I want to be, did I tell him that in real life you sometimes have to just eat cheese sandwiches? Or did I over-bear, and pack a jar of marmite in my handbag? I am aware that about of my dear readers are going to horrified whichever option I picked. In fact I am going to go so far as to insert a poll:

I decided to go down the molly-coddle route although sadly forgot a knife and had to make do with a folded up old train ticket. Sticky and disgusting, but one hopes it was the sort of act of care and love he might just one day reflect favourably on to his therapist.

Anyway after all the carefully coded sandwiches we were asked, did everyone get what they wanted? In this picnic, or more generally? I asked my friend Nicola, and we reflected on this. I think the answer might be ‘yes’ either way I said. She was surprised by this, that I might really have everything I wanted. I used to really want an Aga, I said, but I am not really sure I want one of those anymore, And I used to really want one of those drinks cabinets that look like a globe, but I don’t have space for one and my financial situation only ever runs to one bottle of hard liquor at a time if I am lucky. So, I think I have everything else pretty much sorted, and that BR-CC+J has just been the icing on the cake.

These moments of pure bliss are particularly welcome after a difficult few days. Or a difficult few months I suppose. I have been back to counselling, which I am going to say something about because, well, people don’t say enough about these do they? Its been very interesting and helpful. I had heard before this idea that there was a child, an adult and a parent inside us all. But my basic understanding of this had previously only been used for self-censure, or for the excessive consumption of wispa bars. But it turns out that the parent and child voices have other uses than the promotion or control of unhealthy eating, and moreover there are different types within these voices. There is the free child (who always wants a wispa), the nurturing parent (who will buy me one), the critical parent (who says I am fat and greedy) and the adaptive child ( who has , during the the course of this paragraph, manipulated you to fill a jiffy bag full of wispas and post them to me). Apparently, all these voices have a function and can be listened to, but I am interested to notice where they emerge.

I was also asked to be aware of my body, to ground myself. Where do you feel this? Across my chest, in my shoulders I say. How about your hands and feet? Do you feel anything there? Can you feel them at all? No, I can’t feel them at all. I hadn’t ever thought about this before, I thought it was normal. But now I am getting rather into noticing what my body might be trying to tell me. Anger spreads like osmosis, from my sternum, across my shoulders, down my arms, pulse quickens, breath shallows. It makes me want to say no, this is not ok, I won’t accept this, I will do something about it even if I don’t know what, rather than swallowing it and turning it inward. Sadness starts in the pit of my belly, sore and weighty, then moves up my spine, through my throat, flushes my face and then starts to seep out of my eyes. And painful as it is, this awareness is reassuring, I can tell myself, you know how this works, and you know it passes.

There was an image which triggered this strong reaction in me recently. I was lucky enough to attend a talk by Joy Professor Joy Schaverien about boarding school syndrome. In it, she shared a number of drawings from her new book, which one of her patients had done, a man who had been to boarding school. It was of a man, carrying a little man somewhere inside him, and in child-like writing he had written across the top you are safe with me. On seeing this, I felt the familiar burn pass from stomach to neck to throat to eyes and had a moment of clarity too: that’s what I need, and that’s why I do this, that’s what I have in common with these people and what has drawn me in.

And I suppose that’s what I was realising as I enjoyed my choco-liebnitz and coffee, or BR-CC+J, that I am safe, and I can carry myself with me when I don’t feel it, knowing that the next happy moment is not far away. That I am an adult, and I have built a life for myself that I love, with gaelic playgroups and good friends and rainy picnics. Anything on top of that is a bonus.

]]>https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/on-health-and-safety/feed/0sallypcfraserthe political is personal…https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/05/06/the-political-is-personal/
https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/05/06/the-political-is-personal/#commentsWed, 06 May 2015 19:32:04 +0000http://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/?p=156841Prologue

Me: I’ve decided I’m going to get a tattoo, do you have any preferences as to where I should get it?

Husband: your bottom, I suppose.

Me: oh ok. I was sort of thinking I might like to show it to people.

Husband: what’s it going to be a tattoo of?

Me: it’s going to say “the personal is political”

Husband : I don’t really get it

Me : it’s a feminist slogan

Husband: probably not your bottom then, that’s probably not the right tone.

For some years now I have been living my life according to a Bahktin quote about how ideals are to be loved, held high, aimed for, attempted to embody, thus turning your whole existence into some big exciting revolutionary piece of art. I tried to look it up recently and couldn’t find it, and realised I was in the uniquely pretentious position of building my life around a Bakhtin quote that Bakhtin never actually said. A bit like my friend Lindsay who has lived much of her life believing that Pianoman is her favourite Elton John song. He would have loved that. Bakhtin I mean, not Elton John. And certainly not Billy Joel. But the point is I do love my ideals, I treasure them and try to live as fastidiously close to them as I can.

But the question is, how do I convert my lofty ideals into deciding who to vote for? There is no imaginary Bakhtin quotation party. There isn’t even a Billy Joel party as far as I am aware. So I have to choose one of the existing ones.

The Ipsos Mori people phoned me up the other day. I always talk to them, because a) I’m a bit lonely and b) I used to work for them so I feel their pain. Which political party do you feel most represents your views? The lady said. Greens, I said. But I’m making tea. Just one more question she said, if the election was tomorrow, who would you vote for? I’m burning something, but SNP I said. I remain a bit unsure, but it’s definitely between those two. I am one of those voters you read about you see, a statistic. English, lifelong Labour supporter, voted Yes in the referendum, swithering between SNP and Greens ever since (Swither: to hesitate, vacillate or be perplexed in Scottish – you see how native I am?). But how did it come to this?

I have been trying to trace my own political roots. Two nights ago I was struck by a memory, of sitting in our attic one Sunday morning. We didn’t used to put the telly on, on Sundays. We weren’t religious, or I wasn’t back then, it was more of a pretentious thing on my part: on Sunday I liked to Read The Paper. We used to get The Independent on Sunday, me and my Mum. I liked the restaurant reviews, even though they were all for London, and some of the columns. I wasn’t political then, and I was quite shallow, but would have always considered myself a Labour supporter and left-wing, even though I wasn’t old enough to vote yet. I suppose it was all just black and white for me: we had talked about Labour and the Tories in the playground since primary school, we drew pictures of Margaret Thatcher on our hands in the playground and squashed her, Tories made the rich richer and the poor poorer and Labour did it the other way round, everybody knew that.

Anyway there I was, reading the paper, and chatting to a friend on the landline. All very twentieth century. And she said that Diana had died, and I didn’t know because as mentioned above we didn’t have the telly on. So I phoned the guy I was seeing at the time, on his landline, because that’s what to do isn’t it, when something major happens, so that you will always remember big historical events linked to the particular loser you were sleeping with at the time. And then I went back to my paper. This was 1997, when I lost my virginity, there was a Labour landslide, and Katrina and the Waves won Eurovision. All big changes for me, and some on a more national scale too.

But let’s just stick with me for a minute, as is my wont. I suppose I was thinking about Diana because that new baby’s middle name is Diana, but more I was thinking about The Independent. About how I eventually stopped reading it because I remember that even my teenage brain processed back then that there wasn’t anything vaguely lefty about it if all the fashion and the restaurants they reviewed were too expensive. So the other night when I saw that they had ‘come out’ as con-dem supporters it felt like some sort of old instinct for disillusionment had been justified, like they really never did mean any of it. And this feels like a tiny example of some much bigger disillusionment. Everything has just blended into one big neo-liberal mush. Like there is no left wing any more, just people who vote Labour but worry about catchment areas and property prices a lot. None of it seemed relevant to me. But then the referendum happened.

What the referendum gave us was a sense of carnival, a much needed polyphony (all things which Bakhtin really did go on about). It renewed my belief that politics was relevant, that I had some kind of stake in the world around me. So I feel I have to vote for a party which supports independence. I am tempted to vote SNP tomorrow because I want the message to go out that things can be different, to shake things up a little. But I will vote Green tomorrow because, as I told the Ipsos Mori lady, they are the party which reflects my values most closely.

And I’m really sorry to all my English friends if you think I am letting you down or screwing things up for everyone else by not voting Labour. But I moved here and choose to stay here and I spend my whole life fighting against people who think it’s OK that they can afford £30,000 per year to make sure their kids don’t have to talk to poor kids, who think their children deserve better than your children because they were born richer than you, so capitalism has to be my bottom line. Because any part that does not renounce capitalism has to ultimately slide into nasty neo-liberal mush, the only real question that is at once personal and political is ‘do you think it’s OK for some people to be much richer than others?’. This is linked to how you view the environment, because let’s face it, the more the whole Earth is completely fucked, the more poor people – those who have done the least to damage it – will suffer.

So I say first choice Scottish Greens. Second choice Piano Man.

]]>https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/05/06/the-political-is-personal/feed/3sallypcfraserin which i explore my views on Easter from the starting point of an unfortunate incident with a gaelic folk musicianhttps://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/in-which-i-explore-my-views-on-easter-from-the-starting-point-of-an-unfortunate-incident-with-a-gaelic-folk-musician/
https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/in-which-i-explore-my-views-on-easter-from-the-starting-point-of-an-unfortunate-incident-with-a-gaelic-folk-musician/#commentsThu, 02 Apr 2015 19:32:53 +0000http://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/?p=146572Shortly before I became a Catholic I had a very tortuous and anxt-ridden non-thing with a gaelic folk musician[1]. I say non thing, because we never actually laid a finger on each other, but sometimes a non thing can have more pain and drama than an actual thing, don’t you find?

Anyway this whole thing had plenty of drama. I was even shipped in as eye candy in one of his folky videos but I have never actually seen the footage of me floating round the meadows in a skimpy white cotton dress[2] on a very cold day, all wistful desire and erect nipples, tearing leaves off a flower: he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me…

It transpired he loved me not.

He said I was manipulative and unchristian. I wanted to sing his songs and have his babies. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if he had taken me up on it. He was old then so he must be ancient now, I could be somewhere on Euist, playing the harp and having wrinkly sex…

But anyway before it all went horribly wrong he said a couple of things which stayed with me. He said when I was a Catholic (as opposed to just going through the conversion process as I was at the time) I would like Easter a lot better than Christmas. He also said that the best thing about being a Catholic was that you never really feel like a Catholic, but you know nobody does and we’re all in it together. Both of these things turned out to be true and I think of them often, especially at Easter.

Because Easter is now my favourite time of year. It is refreshingly un – hijacked, it doesn’t cost too much, and it lasts a few days. You don’t have to buy stuff or cook anything in particular you can just turn up at mass for quite a few days in a row and do all the stuff they say and hope that somewhere along the line you mean it. And you usually do, because its all very physical and moving and designed as if to say this is difficult, you don’t necessarily have to understand it, just do it. Kneel, bow down, mourn, adore.

And this suits me because I may be pretty rubbish at lots of other things that are easy for other people, like opening the post or putting the next loo roll on the holder, and I may never remove the things which lurk and go slimy at the back of the fridge, but what I do do is a very good line in adoration. I’m strong on weeping, happy to have a bash at anointing, and can sing songs of worship that would make your nana cry. And I like to think old JC gave a bit of a special shout out to women like me. That bit in the bible where he tells one bird not to faff about too much and be more like the one who has knelt at his feet. Or where he says it was right to throw all the expensive perfume at him. Or how the first people who he said hello to when he rose from the dead were sad ladies. Oh yes, Jesus loved an emotional woman.

So easter for me is about the few days you spend discovering that all over again. There is a process. You get your feet washed, you kiss a cross, you light a candle and get sprinkled with some water. You stick your hands in the great big hole in someone’s side and think about how painful everything is and then remember the good news again, that someone once tried to tell you that everything was ok, that you are where you are supposed to be, and you don’t have to feel like a Catholic or anything else, you just have to feel.

And that there’s always one man who loves you just the way you are. Well, two men. Because of course, when you get your heart broken by gaelic folk musicians there’s always a funny posh boy offering to take you for a pint and cheer you up…

[1] I thought about changing some details here to protect the innocent. I thought about saying he was a reggae musician or something. But then none of the harp-playing euist stuff works. Or maybe he actually was a reggae musician, and the whole Gaelic folk thing is just a red herring to protect the innocent…

[2] I was thinner then. And blonde. Not that that should matter, but to help you picture the scene.

]]>https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/in-which-i-explore-my-views-on-easter-from-the-starting-point-of-an-unfortunate-incident-with-a-gaelic-folk-musician/feed/1sallypcfraserdeep in my heart, I do believe…https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/deep-in-my-heart-i-do-believe/
https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/deep-in-my-heart-i-do-believe/#commentsSun, 08 Mar 2015 21:28:04 +0000http://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/?p=117374All week I have been failing to write about international women’s day. I had it all planned out, I had a busy weekend so I was going to use the ‘scheduled’ button on wordpress, finish something by Friday and get it to post itself today. But for various reasons I have managed to piss the entire week against the wall.

Firstly, and perhaps this is woman’s day-ish enough to be worth a mention, I find I can only write in certain phases of my menstrual cycle (reason-I-can-never-get-paid-to-write number 147) and this ain’t it, so I couldn’t get my words out. I have also fitted in some spectacularly pointless distractions. I had a lady come to my house to do an energy report. First she gave off at me for having all the lights on, but keeping my lights on is the way I cope with the misery of the fact my flat is damp and freezing. She was supposed to be telling me to use my heating less, but when I explained that I only use the heating occasionally because I can’t use the hot water at the same time, and could confidently tell her the temperature was always below eighteen degrees (13 being my record, 15 being positively tropical) she looked like she was going to call social services on me. I joked that my dad won’t come and stay with me anymore because it’s so cold and my husband opens the windows all the time, but she didn’t see the funny side and asked if she could write that down. I thought about trying to explain that my husband went to boarding school but I didn’t think she’d understand. The situation did not improve when she went into my bedroom to look at my boiler and found my mate Dill had popped round for a cuppa but was sitting in my bed reading a book under all the blankets and with her skiing gear on. It’s not that we care about the environment that much, we’re just tough round here.

Later in the week I spend my only child-free day in the worthy pursuit of trying things on in shops and then hanging them back up again. This is something I am enjoying at the moment because due to rumbling low-level misery over the past few months I have dropped a dress size or two. I am therefore to be found on the high street, fighting my age grappling with the latest trends and singing yet more Taylor Swift (I can make the bad boys good for the weekend, but I can’t make them shut the sodding windows), while self-aware enough to realise that there is not a single situation in my life where I could be called upon to wear a playsuit, and I prefer to spend my money on booze and light bulbs.

By the weekend I was all set for my first big gig with my new band. This was perhaps more empowering than the rest of the week’s adventures. It turned into something of a mummy’s night oot, with one mum having explained to her little boy that yes, Josephine and Anthony’ mummy really is in a band. It was nice for us all to be out, somewhere half-decent, and all dressed up (though no playsuits). I had had ‘a lip-over’ especially, which I didn’t know was a thing, but apparently it is a thing. And apparently my lips have a different pH which means they go particularly red with lipstick, so said lip-over lady. This smacked of bullshit to me on some level, but on another level it made me very happy, in a destined-to-be-a-wee-bit-slutty sort of a way.

But singing and playing in itself is a big deal for me. I stopped singing for a while because someone near the grisly end of my psychopathic ex-boyfriend spectrum discouraged it, and I stopped playing for ten years because the guy at the very end of the scale destroyed every single thing I owned, including bending my flute in half. ( I know. These nutters tend to be VERY strong.) So to be making music at all feels like a victory over something, even if I’m not entirely sure what.

And then yesterday I went to an international woman’s day singathon. And it was entirely beautiful. I learned music from around the world, lullabies which have given women a stake in the shaping of their children’s future; songs which bring comfort and strength in the face of violence, war and slavery. I sang ‘I ain’t gonna let no ageing patriarchy turn me round’ and meant every word. I even learned to circle dance and thought gosh, if I could get my public school boys doing this I’d have this whole operation sorted. And I was struck hard by being told that the song ‘We shall overcome’ was taken up somewhat slowly by the women’s rights movement, they tended not to have the confidence to believe. And I felt tearful as I sang, we shall overcome, deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome one day. And perhaps more poignantly still, we are not to blame, we are not to blame today or any day. I wondered, do I really believe this deep in my heart? There in that moment, surrounded by women singing the same thing, I certainly did.

But it isn’t easy. Because when we challenge that ageing patriarchy we are not just not using the same weapons, we are fighting in opposite ways. We see your nuclear weapons and we raise you a circle dance. We see your wealth and unequal pay and we’ll raise you a community garden and some homemade cake. In the face of your domestic violence we offer you a lullaby, in the face of your domineering strength we have only our vulnerability, and the trump card of our endurance. We have the stories we have to tell and the songs we have to sing, and we share them the only way we can. And one day that will be enough. One day we shall overcome.

]]>https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/deep-in-my-heart-i-do-believe/feed/4sallypcfraserBoarding schools: not the answerhttps://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/boarding-schools-not-the-answer/
https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/boarding-schools-not-the-answer/#respondTue, 10 Feb 2015 09:55:12 +0000http://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/?p=95420Hello again. Its me. I wrote something somewhere else which you might like to read. (If you have already read it then I do apologise for Sally Frasering you from all angles). Its a response to the worrying enthusiasm being developed for sending yucky poor children away to boarding school in a bid to make them less poor and yucky, which also conveniently helps the schools appear nicer and earn tax breaks. Anyhow, here it is, see what you think: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/sally-fraser/boarding-school-is-not-the-answer_b_6640502.html
]]>https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/boarding-schools-not-the-answer/feed/0sallypcfrasertonight…Josephinehttps://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/tonight-josephine/
https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/tonight-josephine/#respondThu, 29 Jan 2015 20:27:58 +0000http://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/?p=90655I remember when we thought of the name. I had been in the throes of some sort of huge anxiety or other, a while before we were married. I was lying quietly in bed, trying to pray or sleep or rest or something when the thought entered my head: Josephine would be a nice name if we ever had a girl. My husband spoke in the dark and the silence. “Josephine is a nice name for a girl” he said. And I remember thinking, wow, maybe everything is going to be ok after all.

Once I was pregnant most of the time we thought she was a boy called Frederick. Husband chatted faithfully every day to the bump, always addressing it politely as Frederick Stroke Josephine, but for some reason we thought she was probably a boy. And then at the hospital they said it was most likely a boy because he was giving me so much trouble, and they usually struggle more. I remember not just watching the hours pass during my labour but the days: the twenty seventh became the twenty eighth became the twenty-ninth. And then she was here, and we told them her name and they passed her to me. And I couldn’t believe how pretty she was and she actually looked like a little person. Then her face turned from pink to blue and her eyes rolled back into her head and someone said no, no, don’t , come on and they took her away. And I will always hate the nasty, nasty voice inside me that said look, see, I told you. Did you really think things could turn out ok?

But only for a few horrible moments. Sometimes the faith that really is only the size of a mustard seed breaks forth a bit more powerfully than you thought, and as my thumb and finger found the rosary that was eventually lost forever in the sheets of that hospital bed I told myself No, its ok, this happens. You’ve read about this, it happens a lot, it will be fine. Hail Mary full of grace, etc etc, just hold on. I am not saying that changed anything, I am just saying that it helped me to think differently, to not think the worst for once. And the doors opened and they brought her back in. Is she ok? Yes, she’s perfect.

And she is perfect. She is six years old today and still perfect. I am proud of my daughter. And while it doesn’t necessarily come that easily to me I cannot be anything other than proud of myself for the part I have played in who she is and who she is becoming. Her school report says she has a rich sense of humour. She says she wants to be an artist when she grows up. She writes books and stories and poems which rhyme. So much of what is wonderful about her comes from her dad of course but some of it does come from me.

She is of course a rampant capitalist, in the way that only a child raised by annoying leftie parents can be. She recently said if she had three wishes she would wish for a really big bar of chocolate, a pretend poo and to be rich. Which is of course incredibly beautiful, because one would think that if she was rich she could buy all the chocolate and pretend poo she wanted and she needn’t have spent two wishes on those things. But they were clearly the priorities.

And she looks just like me. I overheard my son ask her the other day ‘what will you look like when you are grown up’ and she shrugged and answered ‘like mummy I suppose’. It’s a strange thing indeed to be confronted daily with an image of your childhood self, to always be staring into your own eyes. Like a scene from Drop Dead Fred, the opportunity to go back in time and give yourself a hug, to acknowledge something nice about yourself.

Anyway this was going to be a lengthy post about this process of loving. There was going to be chat about the ways we avoid this intimacy, about something I read recently about how only sad mice take heroin. There was going to be lots of Ian Suttie, of tenderness taboo and zeus envy and how “the envy of motherhood is one of the most potent factors in culture evolution”. There was going to be endless soul-searching about how I fight against boarding schools because they are an attack on the value not just of childhood and motherhood but of whole systems of knowing and thinking, and a call to whatever the peaceful alternative to arms are for all my sisters and brothers who are too often told that what we learn in the tending of our infants, or the service of other loved ones, does not count in the real world. But I had cakes to decorate, and endless gravy and crackling to make and consume, and all sorts of life in the way. And now there is pretend poo to tidy away, and a husband and father to drink to the last six years with. So soul-searching, Suttie and lonely heroin-taking mice will have to wait for another day…

]]>https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/tonight-josephine/feed/0sallypcfraserresolutary…https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2014/12/30/resolutary/
https://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/2014/12/30/resolutary/#commentsTue, 30 Dec 2014 21:44:11 +0000http://sallyfraserwrites.wordpress.com/?p=70485I had a mental health check with a nurse today. This is an unhelpful process whereby she attempts to cheer me up by telling me I am overweight and drink too much.(Actually, when I think about it, she tells me no such things, its just the judgement I infer). Then I have to go back to the doctor’s in a couple of weeks’ time and he will tell me to sing in choirs and go swimming. I have to go through this process once every six months because I have a history of depression and anxiety, which has been largely under control for some years now. When things are not so good I have to fill in one of those questionnaires where you have to answer how often you are plagued with unwanted thoughts or lacking energy and so on, and you can rack up any amount of misery on the low level categories but as long as you say you can sometimes enjoy something or look forward to the future you are free to go, or if you have had the most fleeting thought of topping yourself or playing with sharp objects you are straight onto deep eye-contact and threatened further action.

Curiously enough, the time in my life when I have scored the highest on one of these tests, i.e. when I have been at my least ever depressed, is when my youngest child was six weeks old and my eldest was nineteen months. And as I walked home from the surgery today I reflected on what made me so happy at that stage, when logically it should have been pretty gruelling: it was the period where I perfected the art of lowering my standards. I discovered that great secret to happiness that is Very Low Aims. Rather than attempting to raise children who didn’t require therapy, I aimed only to raise kids who did not require quite as much therapy as me or my husband. I made it a target to leave the house once a day, any other achievement was a bonus. Rather than trying to stop everyone crying, I acknowledged that someone would probably be crying at any given time and tried to make sure it was me as little as possible. And today I realised that tragically, somewhere along the line, I have lost this sense of simplicity, my goals have grown too lofty of late and my misery has soared with it. With that in mind, I have given my list of new year’s resolutions a harsh overhaul, and copied it here with some explanatory notes to follow.

Amended Resolution list 2015:

Run Successful National Campaign Organisation, in manner of consummate professional and assertive and well rounded human being

Don’t get screwed over, try to limit number of public school boys sobbed to down telephone to one or two per week.

Establish Successful Career

Get paid for doing SOMETHING.

Be wonderful wife and mother, keep on top of laundry

Have sex with husband, feed children, converse with all as necessary. Process one pair of clean socks and pants per person per day (less for husband).

Find Self.

Enjoy Self

reclaim sexuality, own and that of all other oppressed women, from clutches of evil capitalism and patriarchy

use the word “cunt” more.

eat and cook a healthy balanced diet of ethical, locally sourced food without succumbing to the vile monopoly of despicable supermarkets, thus bankrupting self and living in constant state of guilt and poverty

Feed children Kerry Katona meals when tired with attitude of happy blamelessness. Eat less ham.

Perhaps the most pressing of these things is the idea of being paid to do something, even if it is a paper round. It turns out that working very hard for free is not in itself enough to bring down capitalism, and is indeed not necessarily an effective protest against capitalism. Or even if it is, I can’t keep it up much longer, and I am not sure I want to.

I had thought that in the event of the campaigning and writing not taking off I might start a chat-line, for all the readers of my blogs who google things I don’t actually write about like ‘spanked by matron’, ‘anthea turner anal’ or ‘kezia dugdale nude’ (you know who you are. And you’re VERY naughty boys…). But I don’t think that idea is much of a goer because, well, I am frankly pretty un-kinky, very impatient and I have a bit of an annoying voice. I m not sure how much people would pay for me to shout ‘get on with it sunshine’ down at the phone at them in slightly gentrified northern.

Then I thought I would write a thrilling steamy novel about a young (ahem) woman who attempts to bring down the government, the class structure and the patriarchy with her attack on the boarding school system. But, fascinating and rewarding as my work is there is little scope in the narrative for thrill and steam, and I don’t have that great an imagination. So I have decided I might have a pop at erotic fiction. Mills and Boon have been, I believe, a huge part of my downfall so they owe me. And I am such an aficionado of this kind of sentiment-laden smut I would like to think it wouldn’t be too difficult, although I do feel I am running out of words for erection already and I have only drafted half a blowjob so far. So if you see me in the street/at the school gates/at mass and you have any bright ideas do holler…

While we are on rude vocab I should perhaps offer a little explanation of the penultimate point: the necessity of it was drawn to my attention by a discussion of this lovely article. My Lovely Friend Tom had been working on it and was shocked and amused by Suzanne Moore’s choice of favourite word. There is no better word when you want to have a good rant said one of his friends on Facebook. We shouldn’t be using it as an insult but for the thing of great power and beauty that it is, I suggested. Ah, that would mean replacing Tuppence, which is another favourite word, the friend continued. I bet Suzanne Moore wouldn’t say ‘tuppence’ I mused. No, she definitely wouldn’t, it was agreed. So the point is, should we? Come, come now sisters, can we really expect to live in a fairer world if we are happy to denote our most treasured body part using an old fashioned word for a low-value coin? Or should we be using a word that, as Laurie Penny suggests, deliciously enough cannot be said without the slight bearing of teeth?

I am also inspired towards this move to bolder language by a friend talking about the need to use the proper words for things with children recently. So what does your daughter (aged 3) call her noonoo I asked? (I had opted for the innocuous noonoo for my daughter when I rejected ‘fairy’ for fear of confusion come fancy dress season, or when encountering the book That’s Not My Fairy.) She calls it her vagina! My friend declared and I thought: well that’s the revolution happening right there. As much of a revolution as when my husband stood up at a gathering of my feminist craft circle and performed a poem he had written about vaginas, and it was at once the funniest and the most political thing that had ever happened in the history of anything. A poem which, seeing as it’s getting late, I will sign off with..